Provide a brief overview of the importance of information in supply chains highlighting the important information flows and their uses in operations planning.

Demand
forecasts influence decision-making in capacity planning and investment and
impact Operations and Supply Chain costs. Forecasting inaccuracies have been
known to amplify costs the further you go upstream in a supply chain (a
phenomenon referred to as the Bullwhip effect). Information gathering for the
purposes of forecasting customer demand has increasingly become important in
the planning of supply chain activities. Information has also been used to predict
customer behaviour and to design new products and services for customers based
on those predictions. However, organisational practices in using customer data
have also been questioned, with a few recent scandals of data abuse emerging.
This has resulted in the UK government introducing new legislation and
guidelines regarding the collection and use of customer data.

Your task

Produce a report
which covers the following:

Provide
a brief overview of the
importance of information in supply chains highlighting the important
information flows and their uses in operations planning. (20%)

Discuss how organisations have improved
their information gathering and exchange mechanisms for
the purposes of having better forecast accuracy. (20% marks)

Discuss and analyse the ethical
considerations facing organisation in their use of customer data
to predict (and/or influence) customer behaviour and improve forecasts on
demand (30%)

Evaluate current trends in use of data
analytics and predict future practices as
government steps in to monitor the use of customer data in organisations. Will
new legislation result in a decrease of gathering and potential abuse of
customer data? (30%)

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